I'd like to think that some day, the Catholic Church will be nothing but a bunch of men yelling about how unclean women are while the women who were once Catholic shake their heads and wonder what took them so long to leave an institution that seems to hate them.

Suppose you're a woman, a nun, working at a hospital as an administrator, and as part of your job, you're asked to help decide whether the hospital can perform an abortion on a woman who's 11 weeks pregnant in order to save her life. Now at 11 weeks, the fetus is nowhere near viable, and the mother can't survive long enough with this fetus inside her to get it to viability, so the options really are 1) do an abortion and save the mother or 2) let them both die. The nun chose option 1. She's since been rebuked by the local Bishop and has been reassigned to different duties.

Lest you think my title was unfair, here's Bishop Olmsted's reasoning on the matter:

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, indicated in a statement that the Roman Catholic involved was "automatically excommunicated" because of the action. The Catholic Church allows the termination of a pregnancy only as a secondary effect of other treatments, such as radiation of a cancerous uterus.

"I am gravely concerned by the fact that an abortion was performed several months ago in a Catholic hospital in this diocese," Olmsted said in a statement sent to The Arizona Republic. "I am further concerned by the hospital's statement that the termination of a human life was necessary to treat the mother's underlying medical condition.

"An unborn child is not a disease. While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means."

Olmsted added that if a Catholic "formally cooperates" in an abortion, he or she is automatically excommunicated.

The arrogance in that statement is overwhelming. Forget a health-of-the-mother exception--Olmsted doesn't even see a life-of-the-mother exception for rape--and yet Olmsted is described in the very next paragraph as "the voice of moral authority over any Catholic institution operating in the diocese." I don't see anything moral about that stance.

There's nothing moral about telling a woman who's alive today because medical professionals did their job that she should be dead based on your misogynist and archaic value system. There's nothing moral about telling all women that it's better that they die rather than have a fetus (one that has zero chance of survival in this case) removed. There's nothing moral about telling a woman that her current life is worth less than the potential life she's carrying around inside her. At least, there's nothing moral about that to me.